Archive for August, 2015

I could just stop there, but I’ll elaborate. Earlier this year Prager University posted a Youtube video hosted by Eric Metaxas in which he argues that science is the best argument for the existence of god. (The text is the same as his 2014 WSJ article.) It was nothing surprising – he simply trots out the old fine-tuning of the universe argument. (I wrote about this here, but it’s making the rounds again so I’ll take another swipe.)

He starts, however, by quoting Carl Sagan from a 1966 Time article. Sagan said that there were only two criteria for life to exist, the right kind of star and a planet the proper distance from that star. he wrote:

Given the roughly octillion—1 followed by 24 zeros—planets in the universe, there should have been about septillion—1 followed by 21 zeros—planets capable of supporting life.

This of course was a rough order of magnitude estimate based upon what information we had at the time, prior to any exoplanets being discovered. Metaxas then goes on to argue that since Sagan science has discovered that there are more than 200 factors, and the number of potential planets therefore has shrunk to “thousands.”

“the country’s Conference of Catholic Bishops declared a boycott of the World Health Organization’s vaccination campaign, saying they needed to “test” whether ingredients contain a derivative of estrogen. Dr. Wahome Ngare of the Kenyan Catholic Doctor’s Association alleged that the presence of the female hormone could sterilize children.”

Where did they get this idea? From conspiracy theories. That’s it. There is no medical or scientific reason, no credible investigative journalism, and no evidence to suspect that vaccine (the polio vaccine or any other) contain estrogen compounds that will sterilize children.

This is an old conspiracy theory in Africa, based on the idea that “The West” wants to sterilize Africans in order to control their population and keep them down. This is pretty typical fear mongering – based on fear from outsiders who wish the community harm. It is a form of mass delusion.

This week on the SGU we interviewed Jamy Ian Swiss about the scope and nature of the skeptical movement (a longer version of the interview is also available to SGU premium members). From time to time I like to step back and take a serious look at skeptical activism, to see how we are doing and what we can do better or differently.

It seems to me that the skeptical movement has had a lot of growing pains in the last decade, which is good because it means we are growing and evolving. However, the growth of the movement has been entirely from the bottom up, without any actual plan, coordination, and without much discussion. There are strengths and weaknesses to this kind of growth.

We also have to recognize the role of social media, which has transformed the movement (as it has transformed massive social interaction in general). Where does all this leave us?

Jamy and my SGU co-hosts and I explored two issues: the scope of the skeptical movement and quality control within the movement. I have already written extensively about the scope of scientific skepticism and the various related movements and how they differ. Please read these links for a full discussion, but here is a quick overview.

This is an old issue but seems to have been heating up in the last decade – concern over ties between academia and industry. The concern is legitimate, but often overblown, and can easily be abused to justify an unfair witch hunt.

A Nature article published yesterday discusses a recent round of accusations against scientists who support the technology of genetic modification. Before I discuss this article directly, let me give some background.

There is the potential for useful and productive collaboration between industry and academia. Academics are the experts and they have knowledge and resources that could benefit industry. Meanwhile, to put it simply, industry has the money. They can fund research, labs, and educational programs. Academics often survive on meager pay, living grant to grant.

The science of science itself is critically important. Improvements in our understanding of the world and our technological ability to affect it is arguably the strongest factor determining many aspects of our quality of life. We invest billions of dollars in scientific research, to improve medical practice, feed the world, reduce our impact on the environment, make better use of resources, to do more with less.

It seems obvious that it is in our best interest for that scientific research to be as efficient and effective as possible. Bad scientific research wastes resources, wastes time, and may produce spurious results that are then used to waste further resources.

This is why I have paid a lot of attention to studies which look at the process of science itself, from the lab to the pages of scientific journals. To summarize the identified problems: most studies that are published are small and preliminary (meaning they are not highly rigorous), and this leads to many false positives in the literature. This is exacerbated by the current pressure to publish in academia.

There is researcher bias – researchers want positive outcomes. It is easy to exploit so-called“researcher degrees of freedom” in order to manufacture positive results even out of dead-negative data. Researcher can also engage in citation bias to distort the apparent consensus of the published literature.

Both studies questioned subjects about their attitudes toward vaccines and their willingness to vaccinate their children. The Pediatrics study was web-based and recruited 1759 parents. They divided them into four groups:

(1) information explaining the lack of evidence that MMR causes autism from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; (2) textual information about the dangers of the diseases prevented by MMR from the Vaccine Information Statement; (3) images of children who have diseases prevented by the MMR vaccine; (4) a dramatic narrative about an infant who almost died of measles from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fact sheet; or to a control group.

The PNAS study was in person, but only recruited 315 subjects. They divided people into three groups: 1) given information debunking vaccine myths, 2) told about the risks of measles and shown graphic images, 3) control group given information unrelated to vaccines.

The antivaccine and CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) communities love a good conspiracy. When you live on the fringe of science and reason, conspiracy theories are your bread and butter. You need some reason to explain why the mainstream scientific community does not endorse your version of reality. It can’t be that the evidence doesn’t support your position, so it must be a conspiracy.

It is therefore no surprise that when a series of CAM practitioners die within a short period of time, antivaxxers see a conspiracy. A conspiracy would support their narrative so nicely, they just know it has to be true.

This story started with the death of Jeff Bradstreet, a “holistic” doctor who believed that vaccines caused his son’s autism. He was overtly anti-vaccine, supported the discredited mercury hypothesis of autism, and treated autism (including his son’s) with a variety of biomedical treatments including chelation therapy and hyperbaric oxygen.